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The George W Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages. The Library will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.

The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won’t be able to remember anything.

The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t even have to show up.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.

The National Debt room which is huge and has no ceiling.

The ‘Tax Cut’ Room with entry only to the wealthy.

The ‘Economy Room’ which is in the toilet.

The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tour.

The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.

The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.

The Supremes Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.

The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.

The ‘Decider Room’ complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws.

The museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate the President’s accomplishments.

Admission: Republicans - free; Democrats - $1000 or 3 Euros

ELLSBERG’S LESSONS FOR OUR TIME

by James Bovard

Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.

Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.

Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever.

The following year, Ellsberg’s book — Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — came out. I should have read this book before writing the “Lying and Legitimacy” chapter in Attention Deficit Democracy. Ellsberg’s bitter experiences would have curbed my youthful idealism. His book hit the streets at a time when Americans were still inclined to see Bush through a 9/11 holy haze. His lies on Iraq were not widely recognized until after Baghdad had fallen and the WMDs failed to materialize.

Ellsberg tells the story of how, as a former Marine lieutenant with a doctorate from Harvard, he was hired by John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense, and started work in August 1964 on the day the Gulf of Tonkin crisis ignited. He relates receiving the “flash” wire dispatches from the USS Maddox.

Within hours after the U.S. destroyer reported being attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats, the ship’s commander had wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.”

But it didn’t matter, because this was just the pretext that Lyndon Johnson was looking for. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara raced to proclaim that the attack was unprovoked. But at a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came in, Johnson asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” CIA chief John McCone answered, “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.”

The fact was that the United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.

In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon, aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied, “You’ve got a gentleman in the White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I’ve spent most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft.” Lodge later ordered, “Get it across to the press that they shouldn’t apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S.”

But Lodge’s comments were downright uplifting compared with a meeting that Ellsberg attended with former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was visiting Vietnam on a “fact-finding mission” to help bolster his presidential aspirations. Former CIA operative Edward Lansdale told Nixon that he and his colleagues wanted to help “make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” Nixon replied, “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right … so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and slapped his own knee.

It’s hard to imagine any U.S. government official even suggesting to Bush, in his fly-bys at Camp Cupcake in Iraq, that the United States should make sure that the Iraqi elections were fair and square.

Ellsberg’s memoirs vividly explain how top officials are corrupted by possession of what they consider to be top-secret information. Ellsberg warned Henry Kissinger shortly after Nixon’s 1968 election victory that having access to classified information is “something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine.”

This is the one message of the book that no longer seems relevant, since there haven’t been any swine in the White House or Pentagon for a long time.

The Pentagon Papers

In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had, by that time, already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies. However, the massive study was completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the 47 volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”

Ellsberg helped write a portion of the papers dealing with the Kennedy administration. He was struck by the incorrigibility of U.S. policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and whiz kids were at the helm, “There was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing “progress” rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.”
 
The same failures permeate the U.S. military’s experience in Iraq. The Pentagon and White House have concocted one bogus standard after another to sanctify whatever recent policy change they announced.

Ellsberg was a gung-ho liberal Cold Warrior until the late 1960s. As he read the confidential documents that formed the basis of the Pentagon Papers, he realized that he had greatly underestimated the amount of perennial presidential deceit in America. He grasped that

the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force or fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it.

Ellsberg became active with anti-war demonstrators and has great anecdotes of idiot cops at D.C. protests. The motto of the 1971 May Day anti-war protests was “If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” This is an ideal that should not be forgotten by those in our time who have wearied of surge and postsurge nonsense.

Publishing the Papers

I was surprised to learn how hard Ellsberg had to struggle to find anyone with the gumption to go public with the 7,000 pages. Sen. George McGovern at first was interested but ducked out on putting the Papers in the Congressional Record, as did Sen. William Fulbright. On the other hand, Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska had no fear and pulled out all the stops to get the information out.

The New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers was the big breakthrough. Nixon’s Justice Department raced to get an injunction blocking publication, and later did the same when the Washington Post began publishing material Ellsberg sent it. Ellsberg responded by sending chunks of his report to newspapers around the country. The Nixon administration’s rage and machinations were the best PR the Pentagon Papers could have received.

Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman said to Nixon on the day the Papers first hit the New York Times that the result would be that “the ordinary guy” comes to believe that “you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this.”

Unfortunately, Haldeman’s fear was not borne out. Ellsberg was disappointed at the response to the Pentagon Papers: “There remained enormous resistance in the minds of voters and commentators to believing that these generalizations applied to an incumbent president.” This has been a perennial pitfall for American democracy: assuming that the most recently elected politician is an entirely different species from all the rascals who preceded him. It was especially ironic that so many Americans were so slow to recognize Nixon’s treachery.

At the start of his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg declared, “This has been for me an act of hope and of trust. Hope that the truth will free us of this war. Trust that informed Americans will direct their public servants to stop lying and to stop the killing and dying by Americans in Indochina.”

This was the type of idealism that spurred Henry Kissinger to label Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”

In the new century, Ellsberg has continued speaking out, condemning official lies, and appealing to Americans to recognize that wars are far bloodier and more costly than leaders claim. In July 2006, he warned that if the United States attacks Iran, “I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country.” He has publicly urged other Pentagon and administration insiders to take the risk to leak key documents in order to serve truth instead of the current regime.

Unfortunately, even when government officials risk their freedom and careers to leak information, the media sometimes refuse to publish it — or they bury it until after an election — as the New York Times did with its information on Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls.

Who knows how many other leaks have never seen the light of day because of a media that kowtowed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney as if they were gods?

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006) as well as The Bush Betrayal  (Palgrave, 2004), Lost Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994),  and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003)

Scott came up with a zippety title for the interview - “Attention Deficit Police State.”

Scott was spooked when I told him the FBI has added skateboarding as a warning sign for its latest updates to the terrorist profile.

The interview is about 35 minutes long.  The discussion about getting free beer while working as a State Highway Department flag man is in the last few minutes.

Congress may vote for  a resolution this week that would be a de facto declaration of war on Iran.  Iran poses no peril to the U.S. mainland.  But since the U.S. military is on a winning streak these days, Congress seemingly wants to give the Bush administration the chance to notch another triumph before it leaves office.

Ron Paul has an excellent summary of this absurdity and its peril here.

On a radio show last week, Paul commented:  “I hear members of Congress saying, ‘If we could only them [Iran].”

Apparently, as long as nuking Iran resulted in more campaign contributions to congressmen, it would not count as genocide.

People should raise hell on this issue.   And if your congressional representative or senator votes for the pro-war resolution….

Antiwar.com has great coverage of this and many other issues.

I first recall meeting him when he invited me to talk to a regular dinner that congressman Paul held for fellow-minded members of Congress in the late 1990s.   Kent was both very sharp and very gracious - a triple-rare combination in Washington.  I never expected a chance to talk about Ruby Ridge in a House Office Building.   I ran into him periodically at DC gigs in the subsequent years, and he was usually the calmest person in the room.   Living and working in the Beltway area never corrupted his good disposition.

Kent probably did more than anyone else to persuade Ron Paul to run for president last year.  (Kent was chairman of the campaign).  The subsequent campaign woke up thousands of people to the perils of Leviathan and the bounty of liberty.  Hopefully this ‘awakening’ will pay dividends for freedom in the coming years and decades.

Ron Paul’s eloquent tribute to Kent is here,  as are comments by Norm Singleton and Daniel McAdams, two Ron Paul legislative staffers who do some of the best work on Capitol Hill.

THE CAPSIZING OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

by James Bovard

American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees. This has created a voting bloc that overwhelms every other potential force. H.L. Mencken quipped in the 1930s that the New Deal divided America into “those who work for a living and those who vote for a living” — a division truer now than ever before.

In the era of the Founding Fathers, few things were more dreaded than “dependency” — not being one’s own man, not having a truly independent will because of reliance on someone or something else to survive. One of the glories of America was the possibility that common people could become self-reliant with hard work and discipline. Prof. John Philip Reid, the author of The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, summarized 18th-century political thinking: “Property was independence; lack of property was servility, even servitude…. A man without independent wealth could easily be bought and bribed. A man of property had a will of his own.” This was part of the reason that many of the states initially required a property qualification for voters.

Sir William Blackstone, whose work on the English constitution profoundly influenced Americans, observed that a property qualification for suffrage was necessary because if the property-less “had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other.” Thomas Jefferson warned, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

But in modern times, dependency is the highest political good — at least for politicians. Since the 1930s, politicians have striven to leave no vote unbought. Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts. Government aid has become redefined as a symbol of self-actualization.

Americans’ dependency on government is soaring. Federal social programs have continued expanding in recent decades despite bipartisan rhetoric about rolling back government spending. The Heritage Foundation created an Index of Dependency to measure the rising number of Americans reliant on government. The index gauges “the pace at which federal government services and programs have been growing in areas in which private or community-based services and programs exist or have existed to address the same or nearly the same needs.” The index is based on housing aid, healthcare and welfare assistance, retirement income, and subsidies for college and other post-secondary education. While private programs were judged by how much they actually helped people, the “success” of government programs “is frequently measured by the growth of the aid program rather than its outcome.”

The Index has a benchmark of 100 for 1980; by 2005, the index reading had risen to 212, signaling more than a doubling of overall dependency on the federal government over the prior quarter century. As a result of the expansion of government “aid” programs into one area after another, subservience rather than initiative is becoming the ticket to prosperity. Now, roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks.

Most voters no longer seem concerned about leashing government. Instead, many if not most are primarily concerned with directing the sludge of government benefits in their direction. Voters want to unleash politicians to give them more benefits. When government is viewed as a fount of benefits, limits on government power will appear to be self-deprivation. The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power. This was stark in the 1980s debates over a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. The most vehement opponents were organized groups representing senior citizens, government employees such as teachers, and others who rely on government checks to pay the bills.

The key question for many voters is: How much is the candidate offering for my vote? Elections routinely degenerate into “an advance auction sale of stolen goods,” in Mencken’s apt phrase. There is vastly more interest during election campaigns in Social Security handouts and policies than in Justice Department cover-ups and FBI abuses.

A political auction

Sums spent on government vote-buying usually dwarf all private campaign expenditures. Incumbents perennially use the machinery of state to bombard voters with government handouts, often on the flimsiest pretexts. President Clinton turned the Federal Emergency Management Agency into a permanent part of his reelection campaign.

FEMA now routinely blankets residents of swing states with lavish checks for dubious claims for damage from hurricanes and other bad weather. Florida was a key swing state in the 2004 election, and thanks to FEMA and four hurricanes and storms, Florida residents received more FEMA handouts than any state in history. The inspector general revealed in May 2005 that FEMA used a standard that would make a drunken sailor blush. If someone called in and claimed his bed was damaged by a FEMA-recognized adverse weather incident, FEMA insisted on sending him a check to buy an entire new large bedroom suite.

FEMA did not require any evidence that a person actually sustained losses. Instead, anyone who called deserved a check. FEMA shoveled out $31 million in the Miami/Dade County area in the months before the election to compensate people from damage from one storm whose winds never exceeded 45 miles per hour.

More than 4,000 people received more than $8 million to rent temporary housing — even though they had not requested aid and often had suffered little or no home damage. FEMA’s handout standard is the mirror image of that used by the Internal Revenue Service, which has never set up toll-free numbers for people to call and nullify their tax obligations merely by asserting they have zero taxable income.

FEMA vote purchases are bargains compared with other ways incumbents purchase their job security. During his 2004 reelection campaign, Bush often bragged about having gotten Congress to enact a new prescription drug subsidy for the elderly — which is now estimated to cost more than $2 trillion over the next 20 years. Clinton had campaigned for reelection in 1996 by hawking a similar benefit, but had not been able to deliver the goods through a Republican Congress.

Prior to Bush’s Medicare expansion, the record for the most costly reelection campaign may have been held by Richard Nixon, who railroaded a 20 percent hike in Social Security benefits through Congress and then made sure that each senior citizen received a personal letter from him along with the new higher benefit check a few weeks before the 1972 election. Nixon also destroyed economic freedom in order to perpetuate his supposedly pro-free-enterprise administration. In August 1971, he imposed wage and price controls that were supposed to throttle inflationary pressures. At the same time, the Federal Reserve boosted the money supply with a flood of new dollars — creating the appearance of an economic boom while federal controls delayed the evidence of inflation. Nixon’s policies helped cause international financial crises and the worst U.S. recession since World War II.

Democracy and dependence

Politicians have divided America into two blocs of voters labeled “more deserving of others’ paychecks,” and “less deserving of their own paycheck.” Between 1986 and 1996, government transfer payments per capita rose at a rate six times faster than pretax compensation per private worker, according to economist Erich Heinemann. The income of the elderly rose nine times faster than the income for average Americans from 1971 to the late 1990s, largely because Social Security benefits have increased far faster than average wages.

Democracy has also been undermined by the continual growth in the number of government employees. There are more than 20 million government employees in the United States — more than the total number of Americans employed in manufacturing. Not only has the number of government employees multiplied in recent decades, but the rise of government unions further stacks the political odds against private citizens.

Compensation expert Wendell Cox, publisher of the Public Purpose, a newsletter on government unions, estimated that pay for local and state government employees rose more than five times faster than private-sector pay from 1980 to 1998. Cox also found that federal employees receive roughly 50 percent more total compensation than do private employees performing similar jobs.

The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers. Elections nowadays, instead of a vote on what government should do, are largely referenda on how much it should take. The more government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance. Not all government workers, or all retirees, or all handout recipients will vote for candidates championing big government. However, politicians’ ability to frighten and mobilize much of this huge voter base is often sufficient to turn elections into routs.

The danger of excessive dependency on democracy has been obvious for nearly 2,000 years. Plutarch observed of the dying days of the Roman Republic, “The people were at that time extremely corrupted by the gifts of those who sought office, and most made a constant trade of selling their voices. ”

Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised. Every increase in the number of government dependents means an increase in political power. Each increase in the number of government dependents means another person who sees limits on government power as a threat to his own personal well-being.

Anything that increases dependency on government undermines liberty. “Self-government” becomes a farce when the citizen looks to the government three times a day for his next meal, while the government curtsies to the citizen only once every couple of years after often meaningless elections. How can a citizen help steer the ship of state at the same time that he has his hand out for another government benefit?

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003).

He was an inspiration and he will be missed.

He had the best thumbnail summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: “Kennedy aimed high. Marilyn Monroe… Bill Clinton showed his dick to a government clerk.”

Nation magazine’s John Nichols has an excellent tribute piece.

I did not always agree with Carlin’s position but his courage and spirit  - especially in the post 9/11 kowtowing conformist era - shined like a candle on a dark night. 

BUSH: “Of course, if you want to slander America.” 

This is the same tripe Bush has been shoveling ever since the Abu Ghraib photos first surfaced in 2004.  Anyone who accurately labels Bush’s policies slanders America.

Sadly, there are still some Americans who swallow this crap.  Unfortunately, Bush has gotten away with bastardizing American freedom for six years now.

It’s great that a British journalist had the guts to ask Bush the kind of question that American White House correspondents almost never touch.

h/t Think Progress

Congressman Paul replied: “I don’t know where he got that information because there will be no negotiations.  And if they [the Republican Party] would call me up and ask - ‘do you I wanted to speak at the convention,’ I would probably say yes.”  Paul added that “there is zero chance of that happening - so there are no negotiations going on.”

I’m glad to hear that the Paul campaign is not currently negotiating for a speaking slot. It’s good that seeking the podium at the convention will not impede Paul’s criticism of Bush’s foreign aggression.

As I have said before, Ron Paul is America’s best congressman.   It is great that Paul’s campaign has awakened many Americans to the perils of government and the value of liberty.

Paul’s comments in the Antiwar.com Radio interview are especially helpful in resolving the different signals  from his campaign staff and other officials in recent months on this issue:

The Washington Post reported on May 6 that “Paul’s campaign hopes to turn such support into upward of 50 delegates for the party’s national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, where he is gunning for a speaking slot.”

On May 9, the Boston Globe reported that Paul’s Maine coordinator, Ken Lindell, declared, “The goal at the national  convention  is to get a  speaking  slot for Dr. Paul to deliver that message.”

The Los Angeles Times blog on May 12 reported that Ron Paul supporters “hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot.”

Fox News reported the same day that according to Jesse Benton’s comments, “Paul is planning on having as big a delegation as possible at the convention, and he continues to seek a speaking opportunity there, something the party has not offered to him yet.”

The focus on a speaking slot has been mentioned by the campaign off and on going since early February.  On February 12,  MSNBC reported that after the Super Tuesday showings, “Paul’s goal, according to spokesman Benton, is to get a substantial delegation to  convention (they estimate they’ll have about 42 delegates) get a good  speaking  spot, and ‘spread the conservative message.’”

These comments confirm what top operatives said at a meeting of a few dozen of Ron Paul’s key supporters in Washington in late April, according to one attendee.
**
I hope Ron Paul gets a great speaking slot at the GOP convention. Giving the delegates and the television audience a double-barrel dose of truth could be the best tonic the nation receives this Fall.

UPDATE:  I also posted this comment on the Antiwar.com Blog.  It has sparked some heated replies….

UPDATE #2: Some folks on the Antiwar.com Blog are questioning whether Congressman Paul is focusing on getting a speaking slot at the GOP convention. The Washington Post reported on May 6 that “Paul’s campaign hopes to turn such support into upward of 50 delegates for the party’s national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September, where he is gunning for a speaking slot.”
The Paul campaign did not dispute this report when it was published earlier this month.